Shortly after his first birthday, Paul Gauguin was bundled aboard a ship called the Albert, to sail some 12,000 miles from the French port of Le Havre to Peru. The year was 1849, and France was no place for outspoken radicals such as Gauguin’s parents. Charles-Louis Napoleon had become president of the French Republic and it didn’t take political genius to foresee that he would segue smoothly from the post of president to that of Emperor Napoleon III of France. Gauguin’s father, Clovis, was an anti-Bonapartist journalist determined to continue the republican fight from Peru, where he planned to start a newspaper on the back of an excellent connection: Simón Bolívar, who overthrew Spanish rule in much of South America and had Bolivia named after him, had been a family friend. Gauguin’s mother, Aline, was also a ‘person of danger’ on the list of the French Republic’s spies and secret police. Aline had not had much time recently to be a national danger. Two years previously, she had given birth to Gauguin’s elder sister Marie, and then Gauguin himself had come along. Her hands had been more than full of babies. But sometimes symbols adhere more firmly to particular names than to their recent activities and Aline Gauguin had inherited the symbolic mantle of firebrand feminist and proto-Communist from her mother Flora Tristan.
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